Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 21, 2011 @03:42PM
from the yes-please-I'll-take-a-dozen dept.

siliconbits writes "GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray discs while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disk. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology."

Many people use the same reasoning, and for many cases, it's true. But what if you *just* need to backup? HD video comes to mind. How much storage space do you have (I mean physical storage)? how much more vulnerable is a complete hard drive than a CD? What's more practical for off-site backup of large amounts of data (many terabytes)? I much prefer discs to tapes, which are the only option unless you have an ungodly internet connection and can get online storage *really* cheap.

Well, there is magneto-optical [wikipedia.org] that was reliable and infinitely re-writeable. It was just slower to write than a comparable SCSI HDD and was more expensive than them. They weren't very popular, so development of capacity didn't keep pace with traditional hard drive platters, but it probably could have been done.

I don't have first-hand information about this, but I know a guy who's job it is to help companies setup redundant backup systems. He keeps saying that there are so many formats, so much hardware nuance, and so many proprietary methods of getting data on and off the tapes, that he only goes for them in the most extreme cases. Many times he's called in to retrieve data that was backed up 5 years ago, and already it's a challenge to find the right hardware/software combination to do so.

One thing I like about Amanda is that if you just dump part of the first file on the tape onto something with "dd" or similar it has INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO USE IT IN THE HEADER. How is that for future proofing? I've recovered files from an Amanda tape without using Amanda, just "dd", "tar" and a text viewer to read those instructions.

So use tar. Simple solution for a simple problem.There are proprietary ways to do it, don't use them.

Two problems there:

- First, you haven't solved the complete problem. Specifically, you haven't dealt with the wide range of tape formats with dubious or no inter-compatability. I haven't tested interop issues between different LTO drives - there shouldn't be any but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were.

- tar(1) is a great solution to the "I need to back up one server" problem. It's a dire solution to the "I need to back up 50 servers and they're all going to the same tape robot" problem -

It's also insanely expensive. I can pick up a BluRay writer for about a hundred quid, and blank disks are about £1-2 for WORM disks and £3-5 for rewriteable ones. I couldn't find any LTO-5 drives, but I found an LTO-4 one... for over £2000. I did find LTO-5 tapes, but they cost about £85 each. So, LTO-5 works out about half the cost of BD-RE if you just factor in the cost of the media, but you need to back up a lot before it becomes cheaper overall. Cost of backing up 20TB with BD-RE is about £900. Cost for LTO: about £2500.

Sure, if you're backing up a few TB every day, LTO is good value, but for home users it definitely isn't. BD-RE is big enough for incremental backups, and a lot cheaper - not to mention the fact that BD-RE disks have been dropping in price for a long time. You need to back up about 50TB before LTO's cost per GB is similar to BD-RE, and that's a lot more than a lot of small businesses produce.

I swear by tape, use it every day, know first hand that optical media has a pile of reliability and aging issues but would never bother using tape at home or in some organisations with different requirements. Redundant copies of cheap media gets the job done if the volume is not huge and you are prepared to do a format shift every few years, or if the data doesn't need to last many years.The real reason I use tape is because the data in my wor

The real reason I use tape is because the data in my workplace will still have a value in thirty years time

And you think tape guarantees that? I did some work for a company a few years ago that makes a lot of money out of people like you. Turns out that those tape drives that 'everyone's using and will always be available' stop being made, and wear out...

The line above the one you quoted says "prepared to do a format shift every few years".Better do something about that short attention span before pointing at "people like you":) I suppose you could assume that I was only writing about non-tape media when I wrote that but it's a bit of an odd conclusion to jump to.I do have a pile of nine track reels in storage since the 1980s but they are theoretically a third copy made only for transport and belong to the companies that shipped them so I probably can't l

Still the wrong conclusion, but at least you didn't combine your confusion with a mild personal attack like the poster above (do they teach that shit in school now or something?). Tape just gives you a bit longer between format shifts.

An even better solution is to use a removable drive caddy and tray as I do.

Reasons include

Fast Write Speeds

Low Cost

Ever Increasing Capcity

Suprisingly, a decent drive caddy/tray system with drive doesn't cost more then an External USB based drive yet it's far faster. In fact, you can find enclosures that include 10/100/1000 ethernet ports and can be placed onto the home network as a NAS.

Or even better, use offsite backup. As long as you don't have Comcrap with asinine data caps you can use a service like Carbonite for about 60 bucks a YEAR and keep continuous incremental backups of pretty much anything.

Not trying to sound like a commercial or anything, but it does make sense. Keep either an eSata, USB, or removable drive for a local backup, and keep your offsite backup software running as well.

In case of a local server failure, you have a full backup on disk and can restore the most curr

withering scratching etc... Back when we thought CD's were invincible buggers that as long as you didn't scratch them they would last 100 years sure, then 5 years later we realized, oh wow ok these things can fall apart after 5 years. Hard drive vulnerability, sure to an extent, at least they are more vulnerable to shaking etc, though it appears they are also more recoverable after destruction. platters break etc... you can generally get that fixed, now the cost may be very high to repair it if something go

It basically is. This is comparable in size to an HDD, meaning it doesn't really outpace a RAID for storage potential, and most people do over-the-net transfers for all but the biggest chunks of data. This only makes sense as a replacement for backup tapes.

LTO5 is unaffordable for most people, and even most small businesses. Another poster here commented that LTO5 doesn't make economic sense until you're backing up 40TB or more at a time. The drives alone cost thousands of dollars.

What this could be, IF the media price is low, is a good backup solution for home users and small businesses, instead of having to simply buy spare hard drives as backup media. Based on what BD-R drives cost, we should expect the drives to be no more than $100-200 early on, and i

If the media is dirt cheap, the slowness might be fine. Just pop it in and leave it overnight. Having 2 or 3 spare HDs for backups is a little steep for a home user on a budget, but if this stuff is super cheap, then it might be fine for people on a budget who want to keep multiple backup sets.

I'm skeptical, however; BD-R has been out for a while and it's super expensive, and it seems like the companies who make these super-capacity optical technologies never really understand that the media needs to be s

Incompatible formats, lack of portability, lack of rewritability, fragility, and overall inconvenience in terms of storage are what are putting an end to optical media.

The core problem really just comes down to price. Lack of rewritability is a non-issue when discs are cheap. Fragility also not much of an issue if discs are cheap and lack of compatibility would go away if the things would be cheap enough to become standard part on any PC. But as it is right now you have BluRays that are more expensive then DVD+R and more expensive then USB HDD, while providing essentially no real advantage, so no wonder that they haven't taken off.

If the media cost was about 1/5 that of portable magnetic hard drives, then optical would still make sense. Then there's the issue that optical storage density has lagged horribly behind hard drive sizes.

BD-R is still something like $0.25/GB. Horribly expensive compared to little 2.5" external drives which are about $0.12 to $0.14 per GB. You don't have to divide your data up into little 25GB chunks or deal with switching disks 20x to store 500GB. Most machines have USB ports, not many machines have B

That's weird, I was hoping the opposite, that someone would finally come out with a cheap, disposable media, like CD-R and DVD-R, that could replace actual hard drives as a backup or mass storage media. This new technology looks like it might fit the bill.

The question is how cheap the media will be. For instance, we already have BD-R with 25GB/disc, but they're quite expensive, and if you're trying to back up a 1TB hard drive, it's cheaper to just go buy a second 1TB hard drive and use that for your backu

Won't ever be. In a few decades, the dominant storage methods are more likely going to be some form of (holographic) optical memory and flash.

(Though I don't think the disc form will survive, because the surface is too exposed. Higher density will make it even less durable. It's more likely going to be embedded in sticks or cards, which are also less fragile and more compact.)

Yes, and there are numerous formats already available exactly the size of a DVD. For example a CD. Maybe they should have written 1000x instead, since it fits about 1000 times as much as a CD. Blu-ray is the most recent standard, and that's what you would expect someone to use as a reference when it comes to new storage media.

There's a difference. Just about everyone these days has a DVD burner. They're $20 new, and most computers come with them, even laptops.

Blu-ray, however, even though it's been out a while, has had about as much uptake as the Iomega 250MB Zip drives. It's not really a de-facto standard, because no one has them. You can buy the burners somewhat cheaply now (though still much more than DVD burners), but they're not common. Typical computers don't come with them standard. The media are simply too expensiv

How many times have you seen a DL DVD-R? I've never seen one myself, except on store shelves. The cost for a DL DVD-R is MUCH more than 2x the cost of a regular DVD-R, so no one buys them, except people wanting to make a faithful 1-disc copy of a DVD movie. With everyone going to media players now, that's probably fading out fast.

The 100x claim is perfectly valid, because it's comparing to the dominant optical data storage media currently in use. No one uses DL DVD-Rs, BD-Rs, BDXLs, or any such thing in

What's the difference, sum of storage of many hypothetical Libraries each with the capacity of our Library of Congress, or summing the storage of libraries of a bunch of hypothetical Congresses, each having a Library?

So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess./speaking from a 60/60 Mbps fiber connection @ $100/mo, no caps. So I am slightly ahead of the curve but almost all large, new buildings now have fiber. They'll deliver me 800/800 Mbps here if I wanted to pay $1100/month, the last mile is no longer the limit.

I don't own anything BlueRay for precisely the DRM that they are putting on all the devices. Not interested, Fuck Off.

Now if this 500GB disc from GE does not contain any measures like this... and they have readers that they can install into media players, I will be very interested in doing so. That's probably anywhere from 130-150 DVD's on a single disc. Make 3 or 4 backups and keep one in a safety deposit box and you will have all your media (music, pictures, and movies) backed up pretty well.

But that's not the current standard, they might as well reference 5.25" floppy discs if they are trying to inflate their breakthrough.

For consumer optical storage, it is. Bluray might be the big thing for content producers (though I think DVDs still out sell them), most people still use DVDs for back-up, when they aren't using platters. I don't actually know anyone who bought a Bluray burner, much less anyone who uses one. The hardware is expensive, the media is expensive, it isn't wildly popular (for data or PCs), so you can't share it as well.

There are other issues, since it doesn't work like it should thanks to restrictive and ubiqu

I would like to see how much they could cram into a disc with a 1" radius. The way I see it, the only way this technology will really take off is if they make it cheap and convenient. There is little need for 500GB of portable general purpose optical storage - portable HDs work fine. But I could see a use for ~20GB of cheap, portable, and disposable storage; the sort of thing you hand off to someone knowing full well you will never get it back. Around 20GB would be enough for HD video content, anything more would be wasted - better to reduce the physical size.

The way I see it, the only way this technology will really take off is if they make it cheap and convenient. There is little need for 500GB of portable general purpose optical storage - portable HDs work fine.

Sure there is, for backing up your TB+ hard drives. It seems ridiculous that to back up a 2TB HD, I basically need to buy a second 2TB hard drive, or multiples if I want to keep multiple backups.

Hard drives are cheap if you're just buying one, but as a backup media, they leave a lot to be desired.

Hard drives are cheap if you're just buying one, but as a backup media, they leave a lot to be desired.

Not really. They're cheap per GB. They can be read and written fairly quickly (~100 MB/s). The apparatus for reading back your backups is self contained - usb will be around for a long damn time. They're sealed and don't degrade much over time (unlike high density optical media). And you can back up 2 TB of data without changing media 40 times.

I am pretty careful about keeping my original media, and retaining the tag files from my installation and such on my home machines. So I really only need to backup my home directory. Within that I am pretty organized as well. There is lots of stuff I keep because I can that I don't need and would not cry over if something happened to it. The stuff I do want to keep either because it would take lots time re-rip and prepare form the original media or because its my own content (software I wrote

Let's see. Standard DVD size has a diameter of 120mm (radius = 60 mm). You want 1 in (25.4 mm). There's a center hole that's 15 mm in the DVD standard, so let's say it's shrunk to 8 mm. Then the area of the DVD sized disc is pi * (60^2 - 15^2), and of the small disc, pi * (25.4^2 - 8^2). The DVD sized disc has about 5.8 times the area of your smaller disc, so if they can get 500 GB on the big one, 80 GB on the small? Sounds good.

Small write-once read-only media? Make the 3.5" small disks a fully support format - and I might get slightly interested. Because the 5.25" disks are f****ing huge by all modern standards. Even 3.5" might be too largish. UMD-like media (2.5" or smaller; with a case) if it is still above 10GB, might be interesting too.

If you are again with the same old 5.25" shit - do not even bother. Blu-ray - disks and drives - just got sufficiently cheap to be even considered. Your tech, with the current download/clou

I know the capacity is small, but I think the best format so far are the Sony Mini Discs. Too bad discontinued. The cases didn't take more space than the disc and for some of them you slid and snapped it in. No Scratching the media to worry about.

I agree. It's great that they've found ways to improve data density, but that can just as easily be used for reducing the size of the disks as for putting more data on them. Especially with today's miniaturization of everything, some sort of microdisk that could hold at least dvd-quality video would be much better. Then you could have a reader built into a laptop, tablet, or even cellphone.

With the state of media companies today, I dread new physical media now. Just means that they will use this as an excuse to sell you the same garbage you already bought them, and to use this as an excuse to flex their IP muscle. Can't wait for Star Wars the definitive GE super extended edition!

Anyway its all about cost, how much are these suckers going to cost, and how much is the burner. Wait and see. Might at least be a legitimate backup option for consumer PC's eventually if not expensive. Still, even wi

Yeah, GE got a lot a "Government Help" in the form of green energy regulations that favor them and penalize others and sweet tax deals.

GE is the definition of "Crony Capitalism".

A lot of regulations are written by these large companies like GE and Monsanto and their lobbyists to drive the middle sized and small operators out by making them comply with ridiculous regulations that are easier to comply with if you are a large company with a herd of full time lawyers. This kills their competition and allows th

It's not 2 years. It's 5, at least. I remember the numerous promises of 45Gb discs and 70Gb discs using blu-ray technology. The bottleneck is usually the burn-time per-disc (about 20 hours). By the time this is market-ready, HDDs will be 50-terabytes large, and this will be too small to be practical.

And 5 pounds, or even 5 dollars here in the USA (which I think is a typical-to-high price for them here), is still severely overpriced when you compare to the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive. For storing large amounts of data (such as HD backups), BD-R discs make zero sense. You're much better off just buying a second HD.

Why split your data up into 25GB chunks when you can just load everything onto a 2.5" drive, then make a backup onto a 2nd drive.

Simple: I produce about 1GB a month of new data. If I took a lot of photographs, it would still be under 25GB. It's easy to burn a disk containing the new data for this month and pop it in the post to a relative. You've now got cheap off-site backups. Oh, and one of the main reasons for backups is to protect yourself against theft. When thieves broke into my father's house, they concentrated on high-value items. They took his laptop and external disk, but they left his DVD backups...

How many people do you know that have BDXL discs and burners? Heck, I've never even heard of such a thing, just the regular and DL BD-Rs, and even there, I've never actually seen one outside of a store. No one uses them, because the media cost is way too high.

What kind of moron would spend $$$ on 128GB BDXL discs (and a special burner) when they can just buy a 1TB HD for $50? How much would it cost to use BDXL to back up a 1TB hard drive (you'd need 8 discs)? Is it more than $50? If so, then it's a stu

A good backup strategy with incremental backups is to make a fresh backup every so often, and then make incremental backups at shorter intervals in between. Then you can keep 2 or 3 of the full backup sets, plus the incrementals, and have insurance in case your most recent full set fails. You should never have only one full backup set if you're doing incrementals.

18 hours may sound ridiculous for backing up your 3TB HD, but how long would it take to make a 3TB backup onto a second 3TB HD? I don't think t

Perhaps a bigger question: Is it a double layer disc that will suffer from cracked spindles all the time? Never had that problem with my own DVDs, but that doesn't mean I don't like renting stuff from the library.

Another big question: Will the surface be made of some fancy nano-self-healing polymer, or will it still get scratched to s***?